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Sophia Amoruso famously founded the retailer Nasty Gal, growing it from an eBay store that sold vintage items to a darling of the fashion world that was seeing more than $300 million in sales at one point. Somewhere along the way, however, Nasty Gal lost its way. After raising $65 million over its 10 years

The Google Assistant, Google’s take on Siri, Cortana and Alexa without the approachable name, has long been available on most modern phones and tablets. But given the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem, many older devices will never get the newer versions of Android that actually feature built-in support for the Assistant. Now, however, Google is

Here’s a great present for a sports fan this holiday season: Fanchest is a Brooklyn-based startup that curates and sends team-themed gift boxes as gift. The boxes start at $59 and include about $80 worth of apparel and gear from whatever pro or college team you choose. Today the startup has announced $4M in seed

One of the reasons recently IPO’d Stitch Fix became so popular among female shoppers is because of how it pairs the convenience of home try-on for clothing and accessories with a personal styling service that adapts to your tastes over time. But often, personal stylists bring their own subjective takes on fashion to their customers.

It’s been a long year – it feels like it actually spanned about 50, in fact. But now, at the end, some relief: Mario Bear. Yes, it’s just a bear from Build-A-Bear Workshop. And a ‘brand collaboration,’ that horrific thing that usually just means some executives get a larger Christmas bonus and more people are

Professional social networks like LinkedIn have long been a mainstay of business, but what if you are more of a creative bent where LinkedIn looks pretty stuffy? In the US, Behance, a network for creatives previously raised $6.5 million and now the general idea has moved across the pond in the shape of The Dots.

Joblift, a European job site in the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands, has raised €10 million in a funding round led by the London/Berlin VC DN Capital. The round was joined by Picus Capital and existing investors Cherry Ventures, btov and TruVenturo. The fundraising brings the total raised by two-year old Joblift to €12m.

WhatsApp has always said that it has no plans to put ads into its own app, but this is not stopping Facebook, which now owns WhatsApp, from figuring out other ways of monetizing the hugely popular messaging service, which has around 1 billion daily users. Today, Facebook is launching a new ad unit that will

Facebook has provided more details about the extent of Russian digital interference related to the UK’s Brexit vote last year. Last month the social media giant confirmed that Russian agents had used its platform to try to interfere in the UK’s referendum on EU membership — but said it had not found “significant coordination of

Japanese company ispace has raised $90.2 million in a Series A funding round, an amount it’s calling the “largest ever” Series A in commercial space financing. The funding comes from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, Development Bank of Japan, Tokyo Broadcasting System, Konika Minolta and others, and will help the company continue its progress towards

You’re probably going to get a better deal when you buy consumer products — like paper towels — wholesale, but at the same time you’re also buying a very, very large package of said consumer products. So, they might not always fit in your apartment. Wholesale goods are the primary play for a startup called Boxed,

Crowdfunding service and Kickstarter-competitor Indiegogo is now offering an ICO service alongside its partner, MicroVentures. The company will allow users to participate in SEC-complaint ICOs and, like its slow-burning equity crowdfunding service, will pick and choose startups that match certain exacting criteria. These tokens sales will be SEC complaint and the sales are performed within

In 2012, a Raleigh, NC-based company called WedPics launched on to the scene to make wedding photos a little less of a headache. Five years and seven million users later, WedPics is being acquired by Mixbook, the platform for digitally collecting and editing physical photo books. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. WedPics

There’s been pause since Southeast Asia last welcomed fresh venture capital, but one reload is on its way after NSI Ventures, an early investor in Indonesian unicorn and Uber rival Go-Jek, announced a first close of its second fund. The target is $125 million, which represents a significant increase on its first fund of $90 million.

Apple announced a substantial investment in Finisar. Apple is giving Finisar $390 million to build a new 700,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Sherman, Texas. Finisar is going to hire 500 people to work on the laser sensor in the TrueDepth camera in the iPhone X. Today’s investment is part of Apple’s commitment to invest $1 billion

Messaging platform Line has added the ability for users to retrieve messages they’ve sent in error. The unsend feature, which has been added via an update out today, gives users a 24 hour window for unsending missives — so it’s considerably more generous than the unsend option rival platform WhatsApp added in October (which offers

FreightHub, a Berlin and Hamburg-based startup that claims to be Europe’s first fully digital freight forwarder, has raised a $20 million Series A round, just 1.5 years since launch. The round is led by VC firm Northzone, with participation from existing investors. The latter includes Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital (GFC), Cherry Ventures, Cavalry Ventures,

iZettle — the commerce platform based out of Stockholm that competes against companies like Square, Paypal and SumUp to provide card transactions using smartphones and tablets as well as related accounting services — has raised another €40 million ($47 million) as it approaches a $1 billion valuation. CEO and co-founder Jacob de Geer told TechCrunch

Coinbase is growing up fast — or at least trying to. As an emblem of its current effort to accommodate the massive demand on its platform, the mainstream U.S. cryptocurrency exchange just added Facebook Vice President of Messaging Products David Marcus to its board of directors. Coinbase announced the news in a post on Medium.

If you want to make a living creating white supremacist content, you’re probably not going to do it via sites like Kickstarter and Patreon, which prohibit hate speech. Fortunately there’s Hatreon, a hate speech crowdfunding site that, despite having been booted from the web by a couple hosts, is back online and eager to let

Startups die by suicide, not competition. It wasn’t that anyone was stealing SoundCloud’s underground rappers, bedroom remixers and garage bands. SoundCloud stumbled because it neglected these hardcore loyalists as it wrongly strove to usurp Spotify as the streaming home of music’s superstars. But four months ago, after laying off 40 percent of its staff, SoundCloud scored

A who’s who of celebrities, investors and celebrity investors have come together to invest $47 million into Aspiration, the company launched by a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton to challenge the traditional banking industry. For Andrei Cherny, Aspiration’s founder and chief executive, the company’s business is an inversion of the business model of the

Twitter today is announcing the launch of a new feature that will allow people to more easily post tweetstorms – that is, those series of connected tweets that have grown to become a popular workaround for getting past Twitter’s character count limitation in order to share longer thoughts. The company confirmed last month it was testing

Upstream Security, a new startup founded by two cyber security industry veterans, announced a $9 million Series A today to help protect connected vehicles and eventually autonomous cars. Today, that probably means a car using a service like OnStar to connect over the internet to your manufacturer for a menu of in-car services such as

Co-working startup Mindspace recently raised $20 million from Crossroads, a private equity firm in the UK, as it gears up to launch its first two locations in the U.S. While Mindspace is looking to go big or go home in the U.S., it’s starting off slow with its first two locations in San Francisco and

Storify’s eventual shuttering has been a long time coming. The social timeline curation service was acquired by commenting platform Livefyre back in 2013, which, in turn, was picked up by Adobe in May of last year. In a pithily worded note on its homepage today, the service announced that it will cease to exist as

Facebook is trying to close the augmented reality gap with Snapchat with the help of an army of third-party developers. Today, eight months after debuting its Augmented Reality Camera Effects platform and AR Studio tool at F8, Facebook is allowing all developers to start building AR experiences for its Facebook Camera. That includes “World Effects”

Box announced a new consulting organization today called Box Transform. It is designed to help companies understand that transformation requires a new way of working and thinking as an organization, beyond simply adopting new technologies like Box. Box CEO Aaron Levie says that as his company has grown, they see their mission as more than